Ohio Socrates South / 200 MW BTM gas / Williams + Meta / approved Jun 9 / build-around pattern

Plain-English framing. 'Behind the meter' (BTM) means generation that sits on the customer's side of the utility meter and never injects power into the grid. It bypasses every interconnection-queue rule, every capacity-market rule, every transmission-cost allocation — because legally the customer is generating its own power, not buying retail electricity. The trade-off is air permits: a 200 MW gas plant has very large NOx, CO, and PM emissions and has to qualify for either a Title V (major source) or synthetic minor permit under the Clean Air Act. What the Ohio Power Siting Board (OPSB) approval covers. OPSB is the state-level siting authority for power generation. Its approval establishes the location, footprint, and operational envelope but does not itself grant the air permit — that's a separate Ohio EPA process. The fact that OPSB approved on June 9 means the air permit was either already in hand or far enough along that OPSB was comfortable. The plant is two combustion-turbine + reciprocating-engine generation sites, each 200 MW (so 400 MW at full build). Why this is the build-around-the-moratorium pattern. The Ohio site never connects to the grid, so Ohio's grid-side rules and PJM's interconnection queue (which is currently jammed) don't touch it. The data center it serves (Meta's New Albany Sidecat campus) sees its electricity as 'on-site own generation,' which doesn't trip the Ohio PUC's data-center-rate-class triggers, the PJM grid-interconnection queue, or the proposed FERC RM26-4 large-load rules. The constraint that does matter is the air permit and the 24-inch gas pipeline supply — which is why Williams' pipeline subsidiary is the developer.

Primary source · DCD / Power Magazine / Power Engineering ↗